Sunday, December 31, 2006

Another Slice Out of the Bowl Pie

More bad news for the Papajohns.com Bowl, affectionately known here as the Pizza Bowl. The TV ratings are in and it's not good. Of the five bowls owned by ESPN, the Pizza Bowl was the lowest rated, falling far behind the Hawaii, Armed Forces, Las Vegas and New Mexico bowls. And even the Motor City Bowl got better numbers, reports Jon Solomon of the Birmingham News. It's likely the Pizza Bowl will finish at or near the bottom when all the bowl ratings are tabulated. Now it might have appeared the game was well attended if you were one of the few who watched East Carolina and South Florida go at it at Birmingham's Legion Field, but all that was part illusion because most of the "announced" 32,023 were seated on one side of the stadium facing the cameras. There were other issues, namely the fact that the title sponsor could not work out a deal with the vendor to sell pizza inside Legion Field. To top this, none of the major pizza chains offer delivery to the Smithfield community surrounding the stadium because of safety concerns. Fans also faced long lines at concessions stands and there were complaints about poor taxi and bus services from downtown to the stadium. And if this wasn't enough, the vendors ran out of beer long before the game was over. Other than that, we're told everybody had a wonderful time.

2 comments:

I went to the game and the whole city wasn't ready for the game - a restaurant downtown ran out of beer too after Friday nite when we were down there. Guess on a good note some waiters made some good tips. Vendors at the game looked like they were selling beer out of cases they bought at the super market - pretty lame. Anyway we'll go back again for our team.